Recently discovered that Dennis Ritchie died last Wednesday. I am no expert in computers or programming, but I understand his significance in what he's done to impact the world today. I was upset to find out how this man, that accomplished way more than Steve Jobs who also recently died, has got little to no recognition, and most don't even know who he was.

Here's an http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/without-dennis-ritchie-there-would-be-no-jobs/19020 about who he was and why he shaped technology as we know it.

Havent clicked the article, but isnt he the man who basically wrote cross platform compatability software? Or am I thinking of someone else?

That is sad.

It is a shame he isn't as well known as Jobs, either of his major contributions was sufficient to make him a legend in the industry.

Yeah, I mentioned it on the programming thread the other day but I'm incredibly sad to see that his passing has gone almost unmentioned: personally I'd say that he was a far more significant figure in the world of computing... that said, perhaps I shouldn't be making comparisons between two people who've just died and simply say that he was one of the most significant people in computing. Apart from being behind the highly influential C language, he's also noted for his clear and accommodating writing style.

As well as being a technical genius, he was a very understated man and a thoroughly nice chap as well. I consider myself fortunate to have spoken to him (albeit briefly) and I'm very sad to hear the news. Still, what a legacy.

He created the C programming language. And, along with Ken Thompson and possibly others, helped rewrite UNIX in C, leaving little code in Assembly.

He is a legend in the industry, just not in the world. His death flooded my twitter feed and I've seen countless blogs covering it. It's just a shame that the average joe doesn't know who he is, which is why the big media didn't cover it in depth...

Definitely a giant, and his legacy will be with us for countless decades to come.

Woah, fair play, talk about an unsung hero. We still have Alan Turing to thank for the whole idea, but to be responsible for so much of what we now take for granted, and be almost unheard of.
This isn't a facetious question, I am just ignorant, did he invent programming languages A and B, before realising C was the way to go?

There are certainly a large number of important people, past and present, who don't get the attention they deserve. Turing and Lovelace are starting to attract more attention, while people like Ritchie and Berners-Lee tend to largely unknown outside the industry.


According to wikipedia he "has appeared in films including Starship Troopers, Wild Things, and The World Is Not Enough."

I think he was involved with writing B, itself a successor to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL (and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPL_%28programming_language%29 before it), though the latter two originated from Cambridge University IIRC.

Edit: links, and for another generation of the family tree, apparently CPL was heavily influenced by the even earlier ALGOL 60! Though ALGOL looks much more similar to Ada and Pascal, and is indeed the spiritual successor to the latter as well.

That's sad news indeed : /

rm -rf /home/dmr

Thanks :thumbsup: I had only ever heard of ALGOL. Ignoramus, I am.

@Hungry Donner, yeah, I only just heard of Leonard Kleinrock myself, I have a lot to learn. Must get educated.

To be fair, the only reason I'd heard of any of them is that I found the early history of Unix and related stuff to be a personally interesting subject! I manage to be ignorant about plenty of other things. :laugh:

http://xkcd.com/686/

Wow! I never heard of this guy, talk about a unsung hero on the things he has done!

Goes to show how the world can get svcked into popular media so easily

RIP

No I think you might be confusing him with the creator of Java, James Gosling. Java is cross platform because the code runs in the Java virtual machine (JVM) and they've written JVMs for most platforms out there. So code written on an Windows machine can/will run on a Linux box with very little additional work needed, if any. It truly is close to write once run anywhere.

RE: Dennis Ritchie, the guy wrote the C programming language that was then extended by Bjarne Stroustroup into C++ and even to Objective-C. Objective-C is a language that was popularized by Steve Jobs when he founded NeXT after he got fired from Apple. All 3 are VERY powerful languages but C was amazing because of what it could do and when it was released.

Yeah I was saddened by the passing of both Jobs and Ritchie. However, I'm also encouraged because both men got to see amazing things happen with their work.

The Unix operating system, which is an incredibly powerful operating system, is used by many large companies today. It was co-created by Ritchie also.

It's pretty hard to overstate what an impact this man had on the computing world.